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Journal of European Archaeology

ISSN: 0965-7665 (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yeja19

What Would a Bronze-Age World System Look Like? Relations Between Temperate Europe and the Mediterranean in Later Prehistory Andrew Sherratt To cite this article: Andrew Sherratt (1993) What Would a Bronze-Age World System Look Like? Relations Between Temperate Europe and the Mediterranean in Later Prehistory, Journal of European Archaeology, 1:2, 1-58, DOI: 10.1179/096576693800719293 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/096576693800719293

Published online: 18 Jul 2013.

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JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN

ARCHAEOLOGY JOURNAL OF THE EUROPEAN ASSOCIATION OF ARCHAEOLOGISTS

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VOLUME 1.2 1993 AUTUMN

Avebury Aldershot· Brookfield

USA· Hong Kong· Singapore·

Sydney

CONTENTS

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ARn~ Andrew Sherratt, What would a Bronze-Ageworld system look like? Relations between temperate Europe and the Mediterranean in later prehistory Stephen Shennan, Commodities, transactions, and growth in the centralEuropean early Bronze Age Vladimir Salae, Production and exchange during the La T~ne period in Bohemia Zofia Anna Stos-Gale, The origin of metals from the Roman-period levels of a site in southern Poland Pedro Paulo Abreu Funari, Graphic caricature and the ethos of ordinary people at Pompeii Michael Fotiadis, Regions of the imagination: archaeologists, local people, and the archaeological record in fieldwork, Greece Beatrice Fleury-Ilett, The identity of France:the archaeological interaction Philip L. Kohl, Nationalism, politics, and the practice of archaeology in Soviet Transcaucasia Bozidar Slapiak, Archaeology and the contemporary myths of the past

page

1 59 73 101 133 151 169 181 191

REVIEW SECTION

Kristian

Kristiansen, Some recent trends in Scandinavian Bronze-Age r~eardh Roger H. Leech, Sites and monuments: national archaeological records Christopher Knusel, Pagan charm and the place of anthropological theory ZbigniewKobylinski (ed.),Archaeologia Polona Oohn Hines) T. M. Charles-Edwards, Early Irish and Welsh Kinship (Nerys Thomas Patterson) Magdalena S. Midgley, T.R.B. Culture: the first farmers of the North European Plain Oulian Thomas)

196 200 205 209 211 218

W

HAT WOULD A BRONZE-AGE WORLD SYSTEM

LOOK LIKE?

RELATIONS

BETWEEN TEMPERATE EUROPE AND THE

MEDITERRANEAN

IN LATER PREHISTORY

1

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Andrew Sherratt

Two competing forms of explanation have alternated in the interpretation of European prehistory: one 'evolutionary' or 'autonomist', emphasising ecological factors, population growth, and agricultural change or the local development of technologies; and the other 'diffusionist' or 'interventionist', emphasising outside contacts, trade, and the spread of ideologies. Although both interpretations have been elevated to the status of competing philosophies, and are deeply embedded in different regional traditions of archaeology, their widespread espousal at particular periods has often been primarily rhetorical: that is to say, they have been asserted in opposition to prevailing attitudes, in order to correct what seemed at the time to be mis-perceptions and mis-interpretations. The recent history of'diffusionism' is a case in point. Whereas post-1945 German archaeology has commonly assumed an implicitly Montelian view of culture contact in reaction to the excesses of the Kossinna school, many English-speaking prehistorians have espoused an autonomist approach as a corrective to the over-simple diffusionism of G~rdon Childe. The lengthening of prehistoric chronologies as a consequence of radiocarbon dating .has given support to this autonomist view in some periods by severing many traditional typological links in the Neolithic, Copper Age, and early Bronze Age; but now that dendrochronology2 has begun to provide a reliable and largely agreed framework for later prehistory, many of the contentious uncertainties associated with typological dating have been resolved, and issues of contemporaneity are no longer a matter of interpretative preference. The time has therefore come to examine these competing attitudes and to go beyond the often sterile debates which they h~ve generated. In this way it may be possible to combine the insights of detailed regional studies with a broader continental perspective, and at the same time to take advantage of new ideas about the role of material culture that avoid the passive role for local cultures which diffusionism implied. What this Andrew Sherratt, Ashmolean

Museum,

University of Oxford,

Journal o/European Archaeology

Oxford (1993)

OX1 2PH 1.2:1-57.

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2

SHERRATT

requires is a more sophisticated view of inter-regional relations. It is important at the beginning to recognise the relativity of descriptions involVing words like 'dependent' or 'independent', since these depend on the framing of the question. Copper metallurgy in the Balkans may have been 'independent' of the contemporary tradition of metal working which grew up in the Near East (to judge by their distinctive products); but both grew out.of a common experience with the controlled pyrotechnology of making Neolithic painted pottery. Megalith building in Brittany and Scandinavia began 'independently', though each had a similar background in a Mesolithic population in contact with loess-land farmers, and both ultimately came to form part of a more or less continuous megalith-building zone in western Europe. Early-Bronze-Age culture in the Cyclades was a local creation, but received much of its metallurgical technology from Anatolia. It is right to emphasise their independence in relation to earlier models of mass migration or diffusion involving prospectors and missionaries; but it is still necessary to situate them in a larger structural setting to explain why they developed when and how they did. It is particularly important if prehistory is to contribute to a wider consciousness of the past, and its relevance to historical explanations of the· growth and expansion of urban societies both in ancient and more recent times. It is unhelpful to an outside reader to be told that Cycladic or Etruscan culture was 'autonomous', except to dispel the outdated myth that either of them was transplanted ready-made from Asia Minor; clearly both were made possible by a conjunction of circumstances which included the existence of urban trade networks in the east Mediterranean, as well as flourishing local economies and contacts with an adjacent hinterland. What distinguished both Bronze-Age Melos or Iron-Age Etruria were their positions in relation to movements along routes which brought exceptional opportunities by comparison with contemporary communities elsewhere in Europe. The death of diffusionism as a respectable explanation has left something of a vacuum in conceptualising such larger structures.3 The organisation of European archaeology within a largely national framework has postponed the necessity for treating regional cultures as parts of larger wholes; while large-scale surveys of European prehistory have often been relatively superficial. In search of theories on an appropriate scale, archaeologists have recently turned to the debate within modern history and economics on the nature of 'world-systems', created to explain why the formerly colonial territories of the Third World remain literally dependent on the core areas where capital accumulation and industrialisation began.4 This body of ' dependency theory' relates specifically to the last few centuries, and is hard to transfer to earlier situations - even though the eagerness with which the idea has been explored is symptomatic of the need for such a scale of treatment (Kohl1989). European prehistorians have at their disposal an BODO-yearrecord of societies which existed adjacent to, and in many ways affected by, a nuclear area which saW both the beginnings of farming and the genesis of societies organised as states and empires. During this time, many different types and degrees of relationship existed between the Near East, the Mediterranean and temperate Europe. Because of the degree of temporal specialisation within archaeology, in which Neolithic, Bronze-

3

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A BRONZE-AGE WORLD SYSTEM

Age, and Iron-Age experts occupy different discursive communities, these contrasts have rarely been made explicit. With a shorter chronology, it was possible to assume that similar phenomena occurred throughout all these periods: indeed, much of the dissatisfaction with Gordon Childe's classic descriptions of prehistoric Europe stems from precisely such an undifferentiated view. But with the currently accepted chronology, major contrasts are inevitable. Quite different types of phenomena must have characterised the communication networks of fourth- and first-millennium societies, for instance. This is why the old vocabulary of diffusionism seems hopelessly impoverished to deal with such diversity - though the problem is not specific to large-scale topics, but recurs for instance wherever Neolithic farming is described in terms more appropriate to recent agriculture. Archaeology requires a constant sensitivity to anachronism. The polarities of the contrast are already becoming clear. Megaliths and ear-Iy metallurgy are not well described by diffusionist language, and Neolithic societies have a greater resemblance to those described by anthropologists in highland New Guinea than to any of the historical sources for early Europe. At the opposite end of the temporal spectrum, Iron-Age and early-medieval societies - although still within the domain of the anthropological 'other' - have many resemblances to the societies of sub-Saharan Africa at the time of Islamic and early Western contact, with their trade goods and slave-raiding. It is the period in between where the greatest ambiguity exists. Were European Bronze-Age societies essentially autonomous, like their early Neolithic predecessors; or were they fundamentally affected by the contacts and trading activities of adjacent civilisations, like many of their Iron-Age successors? That is why it is worth asking the question: what would a Bronze-Age world system look like? DEFINITIONS:

CORE, PERIPHERY,

AND MARGIN

The aim of this article is to consider the various kinds of structural relationship which existed in later prehistory between different parts of the continent. The term 'structure' refers to the pattern of cultural connections, and cannot be simply read off from the geography, even though it has an underlying geographical logic. A simple ecological differentiation into zones related to vegetational belts, or the contrast between coastal and inland areas in the Mesolithic, is not a structural relationship in this sense; only where the development of a coastal zone is critically affected by its position in relation to other areas can a structural relationship be said to exist. The emergence of megalithic cultures in western and northern Europe, for instance, involved contacts between the inhabitants of the Atlantic and Baltic coastlands and the incoming farming groups in central Europe, in a way which critically influenced the course of their development (Sherratt 1990). Differences in ecology and natural resources played a part, but it was the position of the area in relation to wider social interactions which determined the significance of these environmental contrasts. Such, situations are typical of the development of European societies following the introduction of farming, and can often be described in terms of' central' and 'outer' regions.

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SHERRAlT

There is a further element, however, which distinguishes societies in contact with urban economies and states; and it is to this situation that more specific terms such as 'core' and 'periphery' can most usefully be applied. This is more than just a historical conjunction, but involves a continuing adjustment to new opportunities and the emergence of a degree of functional differentiation. In describing the economic system of the east Hallstatt area as 'peripheral' to urban Etruria, for instance, an active, contemporary relationship is implied: an organic connection such that the disappearance of one partner (or any change in the pattern of supplies between them) would alter the character of the other. By whatever mechanism the goods moved (gift exchange, disembedded barter, purchase via an exchange medium), the two sides were linked by flows of materials which structured the relationship. Moreover the goods moving in different directions had a different character: southwards from central Europe the goods were mainly raw materials (metals, salt, hides, perhaps slaves); what came in return were manufactured goods (wine, drinking sets, probably organic commodities such as textiles or leatherwork) - an exchange of prime value for added value. This implies a 'technology gap', principally in processes of high-skill manufacture and technologies of mass production. There was thus an asymmetry to the relationship (perhaps ideological as much as economic, since this is implied by the concept of added, transferable value), which may be taken as the defining characteristic of corel periphery structure. Is this the same as a 'world system'? In Immanuel Wallerstein's usage (1974:1-63), the term is restricted to exchanges of bulk food products for manufactured goods, between politically independent entities - a phenomenon which he thinks first emerged in early-modem Europe. Such a definition seems too restrictive, in ignoring both the importance of trade in other, more valuable, raw materials such as metals, and also the considerable transfers of grain which took place even in the ancient world (not only within the politically unified Roman Empire, but also between politically independent entities such as the Greek Black Sea states and the Athenian Empire). It therefore seems useful to adopt (but adapt) the term 'world system', though to free it of the specific connotations given to it by its inventor. It would therefore apply to the large-scale core/periphery systems that began in the Near East and Egypt and spread along the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean to create the states and empires of the ancient world - in essence, to the urban oecumene and its supply areas. The term 'core' would then apply to the large masses of urban consumers and manufacturing centres, and 'periphery' to the surrounding penumbra of politically and economically less-developed societies, typically 'chiefdoms' or emerging secondary states. The core itself consists of spatially discrete core areas, not all of which are of equal importance: shifts of core dominance, rivalry, and the emergence of larger hegemonic structures, are characteristic of the processes of capital concentration which take place within urban systems. These have direct effects on the surrounding areaS, which may suddenly move into, and out of, peripheral status. Not all peripheries will be incorporated in subsequent core regions. There are also temporal contrasts, often summarised in Fran